The Scarlet Letter eBook

Full of concern, therefore—­but so conscious
of her own right that it seemed scarcely an unequal
match between the public on the one side, and a lonely
woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the
other—­Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary
cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion.
She was now of an age to run lightly along by her
mother’s side, and, constantly in motion from
morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer
journey than that before her. Often, nevertheless,
more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to
be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be
let down again, and frisked onward before Hester on
the grassy pathway, with many a harmless trip and
tumble. We have spoken of Pearl’s rich
and luxuriant beauty—­a beauty that shone
with deep and vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes
possessing intensity both of depth and glow, and hair
already of a deep, glossy brown, and which, in after
years, would be nearly akin to black. There was
fire in her and throughout her: she seemed the
unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment.
Her mother, in contriving the child’s garb,
had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination
their full play, arraying her in a crimson velvet
tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in
fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So
much strength of colouring, which must have given
a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom,
was admirably adapted to Pearl’s beauty, and
made her the very brightest little jet of flame that
ever danced upon the earth.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and
indeed, of the child’s whole appearance, that
it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder
of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear
upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in
another form: the scarlet letter endowed with
life! The mother herself—­as if the
red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain
that all her conceptions assumed its form—­had
carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many
hours of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between
the object of her affection and the emblem of her
guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl was the
one as well as the other; and only in consequence
of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly
to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.

As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of
the town, the children of the Puritans looked up from
their play,—­or what passed for play with
those sombre little urchins—­and spoke gravely
one to another.

“Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet
letter: and of a truth, moreover, there is the
likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her
side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud
at them!”